Abstract [en]

Something that all people have come across and more or less experienced is climate change. Climate change in itself is a very complex problem since there are no borders between countries that can stop the problem. The link between science and the public is largely in the hands of the media, since the media play an important role in defining environmental issues and to inform the public about research findings. In recent years, reports from the media showed a slightly skeptical and uncertain picture of this problem. This is despite the largely prevailing consensus among climate scientists that there is an anthropogenic climate change. Even though the Swedish media has represented the ruling consensus of climate researchers in comparison with the U.S media, we find that there is uncertainty on the issue among young adults. This study investigates how Swedish newspapers (Aftonbladet, Expressen, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet) frames the climate change in their articles under 2012 and how climate change is experienced by young adults in three focus groups. The study also aims to examine how the young adults perceive the media's framing of climate change. The results show that despite the contemporary media images in Sweden follows the consensus on climate change, there is a widespread uncertainty among the participants in the focus groups on climate change. The study shows that the media portrays climate change in the context of risk and disaster. This might lead to the consequences that the media audience get a hard time to relate to the problem and ignores it instead. It can also result in that the media source information is questioned by the audience since the interest in creating headlines was highlighted among the focus groups.